Chicago District Ponders Residential Program for Homeless Teens

The Chicago school district is exploring
the possibility of opening a
residential program for homeless
teenagers who attend one of its
charter high schools, officials said
last week.

If the idea proves workable, it
could serve as the first step in a
larger effort to provide meals, a
safe home, and supportive social
and medical services to youths in
need of those basic services. It
could also make Chicago the first
school district in the country to
provide housing for homeless
students who attend its schools.

“There are so many kids with
great assets, great potential, and
outside-of-school challenges are
getting in the way of them being
the strong students they can be,”
said Josh Edelman, who oversees
new-school development for the
nation’s third-largest district.

The two-year pilot project under
consideration would not create a
new school. It would form a district
partnership with an existing
charter high school, North Lawndale
College Prep, and Teen Living
Programs, a social-service agency
that offers a wide array of residential
and support services to homeless
Chicago teenagers. District officials
estimate that 6.5 percent of
their 409,000 students experience
homelessness at some point.

Teen Living would provide
meals, living space, and other
help to the homeless youths
among North Lawndale’s 525
students, and the school would
provide the education. John
Horan, North Lawndale’s director
of expansion, said the hardships
of the school’s West Side
neighborhood leave some adolescents
without the basics they
need to focus on learning.

“When kids live in this kind of
poverty, you see there are a certain
number who are going to have no
home to go to, at least for some period
of time,” he said. “We need to
deal with that in a systemic kind
of way.”

The district, Teen Living, and
North Lawndale hope to complete
a feasibility study this summer,
said David L. Myers, the socialservice
agency’s executive director.
It will explore, among other issues,
whether enough reliable funding
can be assembled to sustain the
project, he said.

Expensive Proposition

Funding is a potentially huge
obstacle, Mr. Edelman said, and
the parties have only begun to explore
that part of the picture.

A residential program for needy
adolescents—in which they live
full time on their school’s campus—
can cost $30,000 per student
per year. The cost of the model
Chicago is contemplating with
North Lawndale, in which students
will live off site, has not been
worked out.

If the pilot is successful, the district
hopes to expand the model. It
is also exploring other types of residential
programs for needy students,
and will issue a request for
proposals next month to gauge interest
among school operators and
social-service providers, Mr. Edelman
said.

In setting up a residential program,
officials must be mindful
that any loss of financial support
carries particularly high stakes,
said Cheye Calvo, the director of
expansion for the SEED Foundation,
which runs a public boarding
school in the District of Columbia.

Mr. Edelman was once the principal
of the school, and Arne Duncan,
who heads the Chicago district,
admires its accomplishments,
which include getting 97 percent of
its graduates—predominantly lowincome
students—accepted to
four-year colleges.

“It’s not just a place to go for
eight or nine hours a day,” Mr.
Calvo said. “You’re developing a
home for these kids. So you have
to make sure you have the resources
to sustain it.”

For the planned opening of a
SEED School in Baltimore in August,
the SEED Foundation had to
raise more than $40 million to
cover startup and capital costs,Mr.
Calvo said.

Heidi Goldsmith, the executive
director of the Coalition for Residential
Education, a Silver Spring,
Md.-based advocacy group, commended
the Chicago district for
aiming to provide a comprehensive
web of services to disadvantaged
and homeless students.

She was one of many professionals
in the youth-development and
education fields, including Mr.
Calvo, who flew to Chicago in January
at the district’s request for a
two-day brainstorming session.
She knew of no other district that
has set up a residential program
like the one Chicago is contemplating.
“They’re pioneers,” she
said.

But Julie Woestehoff, the director
of the local advocacy group
Parents United for Responsible
Education, sees the district’s
agenda as an “admission of its own
failure.” By disrupting the lives of
many low-income residents with
the closing of their neighborhood
schools, she said, the district has
helped create the problem it now
seeks to solve.

“They need to save communities
rather than destabilize them,” she
said.

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